Getting Phusion Passenger to install nginx with SSL support

Phusion Passenger or mod_rails has taken away almost all the pain once associated with deploying Ruby on Rails applications. Phusion Passenger recently added support for the nginx web server. My application required SSL support, but Phusion Passenger does not by default compile nginx with SSL support. I’m new to System Administration and even newer to Unix, having used Windows Servers all my life, so I decided to document my steps to make it easier for others with the same problem.

Step 1: Download and unzip the source code for OpenSSL

Make sure to visit OpenSSL to determine the name of the latest source code tarball to download. In my case it was openssl-1.0.0-beta3.tar.gz